Three Geniuses: An-sky, Kafka, Kantor

Despite belonging to different nations, writing in different languages, and living in radically different socio-economic conditions, S. An-sky (Shlyome Rappoport, 1863-1920), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), and Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) produced master works—The Dybbuk (1913-1916; first performed, 1920), The Metamorphosis (1915), and Wielopole, Wielopole (1981)— that represented fundamental “distortions” of narrative, character, memory and tradition through which the cataclysmic reality of twentieth century East European, and especially Jewish, experience could be understood.

Through intensive, close reading of their works we will try to understand this reality, how their vision of it developed a powerful current in modern Jewish literary sensibility and became a key element in European literary modernism before WWII and in its half-life in post-War Europe and America.

Texts (available through Amazon):

The Dybbuk (An-sky)        
Yale Pr.
ISBN-13: 978-0300092509 (pbk)

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions) Paperback – April 12, 1996
by Franz Kafka (Author),‎ Stanley Appelbaum (Translator) 
ISBN-13: 978-0486290300 (pbk)

Wielopole/Wielopole: An Exercise in Theatre (Kantor)
Marion Boyers, Ltd.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7145-2782-6 (pbk)

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

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